Crispy Spring Rolls
There’s something appealing about interacting with your food, whether it’s cooking meat at your table at a Korean place or digging into fondue. Mongolian barbeque operates under the same principle. You get to pick out your own stuff! Whatever you want, whatever you can fit in your bowl! Your own veggies, your own meats, your own sauce! Isn’t it great! Well, not entirely. The novelty of creating my own entree wore off pretty quickly.
Mongo was not my first time at the “barbeque” rodeo, though it is the first Mongolian restaurant I’ve been to in Texas. Like other places I’ve been to, it’s set up buffet-style. You get three bowls to fill up. A silver bowl for vegetables, a smaller bowl—more of a ramekin, really—for meat, and an even smaller one for sauce. You leave the bowls with the chef and your waitress brings it to your table once it’s cooked.
I grabbed a tray and started filling up my bowl with fresh mushrooms, carrot strips with scalloped edges, scallions, raw green beans, snow peas, bean sprouts and a dash of sliced onions. So far, so good.
When I went to fill up my meat bowl, however, I ran into a problem. There were several selections of meat and seafood, all in silver buffet vats, and all raw. For some reason, raw meat never fails to inspire a vegetarian impulse in me. Maybe I’m just a big wuss, but there’s something about digging around a giant mass of chicken strips with a pair of tongs that fails to inspire hunger in me. It sticks to itself and to the tongs. It just doesn’t feel right. I manned up as best as I could, though, and filled my bowl with a mix of white meat chicken and beef. (They also had dark meat chicken, tilapia, shrimp, scallops, ham, and pork.)
The next two phases were spices and sauces. There were a couple of rows of spices with teaspoons nestled in them. I decided to stick with the KISS principle—keep it simple, stupid—and opted for a salt/pepper mix. I put it on my veggies and on my meat. At the last second, I saw lemon pepper and thought I’d throw a little bit on for good measure. I got to the sauce selection, filled my last bowl two-thirds of the way to the top with Mongolian BBQ Sauce, and slid my tray on the provided shelf.
While I was waiting for my ingredients to cook, my mother, who had ordered teriyaki salmon, was brought miso soup and a salad with ginger dressing. Ginger dressing is one of my favorite things to eat (I love the tang) so I asked the waitress if I could get a house salad. “We don’t have house salads,” she told me. Clearly they have house salads, she just didn’t know how to ring it up on our tab. Or care to figure it out. One of those weird Kafkaesque situations. With salad. Anyway, I digress.
"One Bowl" Dinner
When my food arrived, I took a bite and was knocked in the face with lemon pepper. It was all I could taste. I probably put about a teaspoon of lemon pepper in my tiny bowl of vegetables, which was clearly enough to overpower it. But I wasn’t really thinking about proportions, or about how lemon pepper was going to taste with Mongolian BBQ sauce. I was tired and hungry and throwing things in a bowl.
Herein lies the problem with Mongolian barbeque, and with Mongo in particular: you’re the chef. Some places sauce and season your veggies and meats for you, but Mongo leaves everything to their diners. All they do is cook it for you. I imagine some people—people who know how to season their food properly, perhaps?—would love Mongo. For me, however, if I’m going out to eat, I’d rather a chef make decisions about the flavors on my plate. Those crispy spring rolls were pretty delicious, though.
